Organizing In The Trump Era – Trump’s Other Businesses

Not only has no US president been more vulnerable—economically, socially, psychologically—to his own constituents than Donald Trump will be, there’s not even a close second.

We’ve already talked about this in some detail, using Trump Tower as an example. In this post I just want to use the rest of Trump’s business empire to sketch some of the breadth of his vulnerability.

Again, because it can’t be said too often, I’m talking only about Trump’s vulnerability to disciplined, nonviolent campaigns led by his constituents and aimed at influencing his actions as president, and/or persuading his political allies to remove their support from him. (Others better equipped than I will have to analyze the more troubling possibilities: e.g., terrorists attacking one or more of the Trump Organization’s highly visible properties in the US or around the world, foreign-controlled banks calling in (or threatening to call in) Trump’s business loans unless President Trump follows a particular course of action.)

And it’s hard to imagine a businessman-turned-Republican-president whose business interests are more accessible to his political opponents. Virtually all of Trump’s domestic properties and business interests are located in parts of the country where he’s already enormously unpopular. Just look:

To the extent Trump’s businesses rely for their profitability on 1) his good name, and 2) large numbers of satisfied customers who buy his goods and services, those businesses are vulnerable to all manner of nonviolent tactics and strategies aimed at inflicting pain—economic, social and/or psychic—on Mr., soon to be Pres., Trump.

There’s an entire virtual arsenal filled with hundreds of nonviolent “weapons” that could be brought to bear on Trump’s businesses and the people those businesses rely upon. (198 of those “weapons” are listed here at the website of the invaluable Albert Einstein Institution.)

In fact, Trump and his businesses are so vulnerable and so exposed to so many people, one of the major challenges for his opponents will be summoning up the collective discipline to 1) act strategically, and 2) maintain nonviolence in the face of a) overwhelming violence, b) subversive infiltration, or c) both.